Lives of Streeties: A study on the activity budget of free-ranging dogs

Lives of Streetiesis an ongoing study that I am conducting on the street dogs of Bangalore, India. Streeties is a term of endearment that Bangaloreans use to refer to the dogs that roam free on the streets of the city.

I spent most of 2015 flying back and forth from India to the US (that’s more than a 24hr long flight most times and once my layover alone was 22 hrs!). I was flying to the US to attend the year-long education on dog behaviour and canine care by Turid Rugaas in Asheville, North Carolina. Turid Rugaas is a canine behaviour expert and dog trainer from Norway, who is the author of the bestseller, “On Talking Terms with Dogs” and is credited with coining the term “Calming Signals”, to describe several signals dogs use as part of their communication with each other and with us. As part of this education, we were all required to do a project. Lives of Streeties was my project.

The whole thing started when a question was raised in class: “How much physical exercise versus mental stimulation do dogs need?” We figured that studying free-ranging animals in their natural habitat would yield answers. After all, animals in the wild do not need to be told what the optimal exercise is for them. They just know. But observing wild dogs (Cuon alpinus and Lycaon pictus) would not answer the question for our domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). That’s when I realized that studying the street dogs of urban India would be a close approximation to studying free-ranging dogs in an urban habitat (dense and busy environment).

The first version of my study involved a failed attempt at trying to trail a street dog for 24 hours. Street dogs are notoriously good at shaking off a tail! In the second version of my study, I picked a time slice out of a day and recorded the activities of several dogs I saw during that time slice. I then averaged my recordings over several observation sessions.

Each day I would set out at an hour mark and walk for 45 minutes, recording all the dogs I saw along the way. Of course, given my close-range camera, I had to get fairly close to the dogs, causing them to alter their behaviour. So, I was careful to record the activity they were engaged in before I interfered.

At first glance, the activity budget looks a little like this: Sleeping and sleeping-curled-up are by far the most frequent activities. Resting, foraging, and standing are the next most prominent activities. Walking and trotting come next. And of course, there is a host of other activities that can be observed in much lower frequency, such as barking, grooming, begging, stretching, scratching, playing, pooping, peeing, rolling, and getting petted by people.

Buckets of Streeties Data

The next level of analysis of the data involved arranging all these activities into basic divisions, which is called bucketing, and then creating graphs of the activities within each of the buckets. The three pairs of categories I used for my buckets were:

Asleep versus awake dogs

Dogs not on their feet versus dogs on their feet

Stationary dogs versus moving dogs

In the first graph, you will notice that one single activity predominates the daily activity chart – snoozing! It’s a staggering 40 percent of the activity profile of dogs. The second graph is more pronounced, with close to 60 percent of the profile representing dogs not on their feet or inactive dogs. But it’s the final graph that came as a shocker to me. It revealed that less than quarter of the activity profile actually involved movement of some sort. Bear in mind that this movement includes walking, trotting, foraging, and a host of other activities like begging, pooping, peeing, being petted, and rolling.

As a side note, another independent study conducted by a research institute in Kolkota, India, reveals the exact same numbers when it comes to the percentage of inactive dogs.

The big takeaway for me is that dogs chose not to be very active. They seem to need far less movement than I had imagined. When we think of street dogs, we conjure up images of them leading highly active lives involving lots of car chasing, playing, fighting, and generally strutting around. On the contrary, they seemed to prefer one activity over all else – sleeping.

I have been trying to determine why the street dogs sleep so much. One possible explanation could be that they are trying to conserve energy to expend when they are awake. While this might be true, I am not sure they are expending more energy than our pet dogs. When awake, their activities are not high intensity chasing activities. Instead, they seem to mostly be lazily walking around, looking for things to do or going from one familiar feeding spot to the next (most of the street dogs I studied seemed to have found human “friends” who fed them outside their homes or shops).

Another consideration would be stress. Again, on this front, I found the dogs that I studied to not seem stressed at all. They showed no signs of elevated stress levels in their body language. When approached, all of them were relaxed, cautiously curious (like most street dogs) and very friendly once they realized I was no threat. When awake, they seemed to spend most of their time perched on an elevated surface if they could find one, and just watching the world go by.

I tend towards believing that this is just the way dogs are. We were taught in class that dogs needed a lot of sleep and very relaxed walks that stimulate their brains more than a focus on providing intense exercise. For me this was a paradigm shift, so the results of this study came as a bit of a shocker. I have started trying this relaxed approach with my dogs and with my clients’ dogs. We bring down the “physical exercise” component of the walks, slow walks down to as slow as possible, focusing a lot on aimless meandering that involves a lot of sniffing. We also have cut out all intensely active games like fetch, running, and Frisbee. This approach, combined with other lifestyle changes, seems to be calming dogs down faster than I thought it would. We manage the weight of all these dogs with wholesome fresh food, carefully designed for weight loss. It seems to be working well for us.

The next set of graphs tries to examine how these activities change across the day because, as one might imagine, the activity levels certainly do not stay constant through the day.

The first graph looks at how much dogs sleep during the 24 hours of a day. This graph does bounce about a bit during the daytime. But after nightfall, there was a clear skew towards awake dogs.

A very similar skew is noticeable when looking at the number of dogs on their feet. This data is more erratic, though, and will perhaps reveal clearer patterns when there is more data.

When observing moving dogs, the trend is far more acute. Notice the pronounced lack of activity during the day and how that balance changes during the night and early hours of the morning.

There are missing hours in these graphs due to heavy unseasonal rains that skewed the data. They will be filled in this winter and the graphs will be updated.

The marked difference in activity profiles during the day and night could have several explanations. It could mean dogs prefer the dark, or lower temperatures, or lower human and vehicular traffic. I suspect that a combination of these factors is at play.

This study posed a lot of challenges for me. The lack of better equipment that would have allowed me to stay father away from the dogs did interfere with the study. Night-time data collection was hard due to the limitations of my equipment and the safety concerns for women in my city.

This study is promising enough for me to continue it at least until I double the amount of data and fill in the gaps in the graph. While the graphs here are very telling regarding the level of physical activity a dog is involved in, it does not say much about the extent of mental stimulation a street dog gets. Mental stimulation is hard to define, observe, and quantify and has hence been left out of this particular study, but seems like an interesting area to explore in the future.

The distinctive patterns this study exposes tell me that this is definitely a viable way to study a lot more about our dogs and their “natural” behaviour. The access I have to these free-ranging dogs gives me hope that this is the first of many more studies of this nature and I eagerly look forward to collaborations with canine behaviour enthusiasts from around the world in developing several more studies to expand our knowledge.

Sindhoor is a canine behaviour consultant. She works in Bangalore, India and provides consultation for guardians of companion dogs and conducts courses for aspiring professionals. She completed her education with Turid Rugaas, is a full member of Pet Dog Trainers of Europe (PDTE), editor of the PDTE Newsletter, affiliate of International School of Canine Psychology and Behaviour (ISCP) and a member of Pet Professional Guild (PPG). She is the founder of Bangalore Hundeskole and Bangalore Hundeskole Academy.

4 Comments

Jane
on February 17, 2017 at 9:21 pm

I have been to India and other countries where there are a large number of street dogs. I question the health of these dogs vs dogs in US and other developed countries. I wonder if disease and parasites might play a part in the “down” times. They just do not seem to have the vitality of the dogs I know who enjoy agility and frisbee etc.

Jane, I thought exactly the same thing. Although the study is intersting, it is not very scientific.i have worked with free roaming dogs in remote indigenous communities in Australia, who often have significant health issues. Unless we know the parasite burdens, disease status, age, and other general health questions we cannot draw accurate comparisons to ‘first world’ dogs.

Good points, but i dont think condition & parasites is the whole story. I’ve watched quite a lot of footage with free ranging dogs (YouTube videoes & mini documentaries etc) in eg city dumps in Mexico, villages and urban environments in Africa, India, etc. Some dogs look terrible clearly are burdened by parasites, but many actually look quite healthy & happy, albeit worn & dirty. However, they are all just lazing around, none have the kind of activity levels often seen in pet dogs.

I have an adopted Australian ex-camp dog, and even though she seems to have a working breed(s) in her (was initially listed as a Heeler/Kelpie X – a vet’s guess – and the heeler part seems right), she is surprisingly low energy. She is happy do short bursts of training for food, but she sleeps most of the time and prefers to mostly hang out and watch her surroundings during walkies, rather than walk. She is on preventative anti-worm treatments etc so shouldnt have parasites, and she is in a good condition, gets good food etc. Her energy level is so low that we’ve had her thoroughly examined by vets to try to figure out if anything was wrong, but the vet thinks that she is just not a high energy dog. Of course, I don’t know if she is representative of camp dogs as a type

This is an interesting little study of what I agree are the natural dogs, very interesting topic.

However, I think street dogs are very different from breed dogs in regard to activity levels due to having evolved naturally and still being naturally selected for survival in their urban niche of trash & handouts, where so many dogs live on relatively scarce resources.

Breed dogs (pure breds & mutts) have been shaped through artificial selection in environments with abundant resources, where other factors than resource conservation & staying out of trouble determined who got to pass on their genes. Many breeds were originally bred to do highly active jobs (eg hunting, herding etc), so there would have been selective pressure on them for high activity levels, and there would have been little or no selective pressure against high activity levels, because they’d be fed all they needed. Whoever worked best and hardest would get to pass on their genes, and energy conservation would not come into it at all.

” Streeties”, on the other hand, don’t need to do any work to earn food or the right to reproduce, they just need to show up where the food is delivered (whether it is trash or handouts from friendly people) at the right time, and be able to live on whatever is provided, and get along with people & other street dogs. Ambitious and highly active street dogs would be naturally selected against. Unnecessary energy use would not only waste scarce resources, but also probably heighten the risks of injuries, heat strokes etc (especially the more dramatic kind, like chasing cars or fighting), and most street dogs probably don’t have any access to veterinary help, so they better minimise risks if they want to survive. Statistically, lazy street dogs probably have better survival chances (& thereby reproductive success) than active ones… Whereas this is not the case for breed dogs, for whom reproductive success is determined by either looks (show & pet dogs), or working ability (working dogs).

So I don’t think street dogs can be used as a model for the “natural” activity needs in dogs, even though they are the ‘natural dogs”. I think they are only good models for dog types that are quite like them (eg adopted street dogs, pariahs). For breed dogs (including mutts), I think the activity needs will vary a lot depending on the type of dogs, some breeds & crosses have very high activity needs.

Have you read ” What is a dog?” by Coppinger & Coppinger… which is mostly about street dogs. I found it fascinating & eye opening. It has changed my perspective on dogs, & made me very curious about street dogs around the world.

I am looking forward to reading more about your continued studies of “streeties”